changes his mind. The merry breakfaster finds that a turn among the trees will add the button-hole to his complacency. The grave young scholar, with his gown almost to his heels, and the older one whose gown and cap resemble nothing that is worn by any save a tramp, meet there on summer evenings. The freshman gives the highest colour and purest atmosphere to his prophetic imaginings when he walks there first. One says that the garden is partly a confessor and partly an aunt. Above all, it is the resort of those who are about to leave Oxford for ever; and under its influence those who have forgotten all their ambitions, and those who are beginning to remember them, meet on some June or October afternoon, to decide that it has been worth while; and between the trees the college has a half-domestic, half-monastic air; all else is quite shut out, except where, like a curve of smoke, a dome rises, and the wraith of a spire among the clouds. OLD OXFORD DAYS CHAPTER VIII OLD OXFORD DAYS The history of a college like New or Wadham is written clearly on its walls. It rose by one grand effort, from one grand conception, at the will of founder and architect. All its future uses were more or less plainly implied in the quadrangles, chapel, and hall, through which the opening procession marched with solemn music; they stood in need of little more than time and good fortune. Such a college was then in a sense mature, fully armed and equipped, before the founder’s decease. But it was more characteristic of an Oxford college to be evolved irregularly, by strange and difficult ways, with much sudden expansion and decline, into its present state. Thus Lincoln and Oriel were, for a short time after their foundation, fallow, if not extinct. The latter, in spite of its renovation by a king, after whom it was at first inclined to be named, grew up around the humble, illustrious tenement of La Oriole, where its early scholars dwelt, and whence they gave their society its lasting name. That cradling tenement has its parallel in many a college history.